First half of 2018 sees 45,000 electronic building permits issued

(Illustration) A total of 200,100 building permits have been issued through the Central Register of Unified Procedures for the Issuing of Building Permits (CEOP) in two and a half years, and the total number of sent electronic requests has increased by 10.27%.

These are the latest data published on the website of the Business Registers Agency. As said, around 45,000 permits were issued in the first half of the current year, which is 13.2% more than in the same period last year.

The issuing of a building permit usually takes seven work days, and in some municipalities it takes slightly more, which is a huge step forward considering that the issuing could take six months, or even a whole year. Building permits and all other documents in this field are issued electronically in Serbia. Furthermore, the number of procedures has been reduced and parafiscal charges in construction have been abolished. For example, exploitation permits are no longer paid for, whereas they used to cost 0.2% of the value of the facility.

The increase in the number of issued building permits also reflects on an increase of the executed works, which were 28.4% higher in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.

The preliminary data of the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure say that the growth of the value of the construction works executed continued in the second quarter of 2018, which was confirmed, among other things, with the fact that 48% of the funds meant for the traffic infrastructure in 2018 were spent.

– The results realized in the field of construction and transport have contributed considerably to the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Serbia in the first three months of the current year, which amounted to 4.6%, the press release says. Construction, primarily apartment construction, contributed to the growth with 25%.

In addition to an increase in the number of received and solved requests at CEOP, which confirms the efficiency of the system for the electronic issuance of construction permits, the data from the financial reports for 2017 confirm that the sector of construction, after incurring losses for years, is realizing positive results, with a net profit of RSD 8.8 billion. This is a huge leap compared to 2016, when the construction sector had a loss of RSD 12 billion.